City of Hope (13 page)

I did not like the way his thigh was pressing up against mine, but I didn't want to be rude. He was just drunk, but he seemed to have changed since disappearing. “I think it's probably time I was getting back to the hotel,” I said.

“Are you tired?” he asked, leaning in closer.

“Yes,” I said. His hand reached down beneath the table and squeezed my thigh. I felt a leap of horror, then he removed it and fumbled in his trouser pocket.

“I've got something for that.” 

He took out a small box, not his cigarette case, and laid it on his lap where it couldn't be seen. He flicked it open and it was filled with white powder.

“This will liven you up, Ellie—let's keep the party going.”

It took a few seconds for it to sink in. Cocaine! I wasn't stupid. I knew about drugs, how the scourge of low society had become the recreation of high society. It had only recently been outlawed with the same vigor as had been shown during Prohibition in the 1920s.

He closed the box and put it on the table in front of him, and his hands went down again. I was frozen with fear as I felt his fat fingers move down my thighs, seeking out the hem of my skirt, sliding it up, up my legs.

“Come on, little Irish girl,” he whispered, “relax. Look at your friend—she's having a good time.”

I tried to stand up, but his hand was pressed against my groin, searching me out. I wanted to cry. Stupid, stupid! How could I have been so reckless? I looked about me—all pretense at decorum or style seemed to have fled from the room. Everyone was drunk; people flung themselves around the dance floor with abandon, with the Negro band blowing harder, plucking faster—egging on the rich white fools to exhibit their lust, their deranged desires. I had to get out of there. I set aside my sense of endangerment and found anger was close to hand. I pushed him away using all my strength and called out, “NO!”

I shoved him hard, and he banged his head against the sharp edge of the banquette. People at the next table turned to see what all the fuss was about, but I didn't care. I grabbed my bag and pushed through the crowd of revelers, shoving them aside in my sober march. “Sheila,” I shouted, heading straight across to her on the dance floor, “we're going!”

I grabbed her arm, but she just laughed at me. Hysterically, throwing her head back, she shook herself easily out of my grip.

“I'm not going anywhere,” she slurred, smiling. Eric grabbed her hand and pulled her, in one stoned stumble, back into their wild dance.

“Bye, Ellie—bye-di-bye . . .” she called back at me, waving and laughing, oblivious.

I was furious, everyone was looking at me and I stormed off, but as I was collecting my coat from the check-booth I realized I had to go back for Sheila. She was my friend, and I could not in all conscience leave her in that drunken state in the company of two strange men. I checked out her coat, marched onto the dance floor and threw it over her shoulders.

“We're going back to The Plaza,” I said.

Eric was furious, but she held up her hand and whispered something to him that made him smile.

“Come on then, Ellie,” she said, “I'll walk you out.”

As we hit the fresh air she stopped by the awning and took out a cigarette. Her coat was perched over her shoulders and she secured it with a small shrug. She seemed suddenly to have sobered up.

“I'm not coming back with you, Ellie,” she said. She showed me her profile and her eyes squinted against the black sky as she lit the cigarette. She took a deep drag, her lips tightening around it in a hard pucker.

“To tell you the truth, I've left Alex.”

“When?” I asked.

She looked at me directly. Her expression was hard, and any shred of sweetness was gone.

“When do you
think
? Just before I came to see you.”

“Why?”

“He caught me, with another man. There, I've said it. I suppose you're shocked: Miss Goody-Two-Shoes—I knew you wouldn't approve, that's why I kept my mouth shut.”

“You could have told me.”

“It doesn't matter, Alex is broke anyway. The marriage was dead long ago. Hence the affair.”

“Let's go back to the hotel and talk.”

Sheila stubbed out her cigarette and pulled the coat back around her shoulders again.

“I'm sorry, Ellie, but I'm going back in.” She turned on her heels.

“Sheila!”

Her name came out in a disapproving squall that made me sound like a schoolmistress. I hadn't meant it to sound like that. The truth was that I was frightened—for her or for myself, I wasn't sure.

“Ellie, look.” She came over and put her hand on my arm. “You've got enough on your plate, what with John dying and . . . I know it's sad and everything, but I . . .”—her eyes fell at the ground as if she was ashamed, then she lifted her chin in defiance—“. . . well, I can't be miserable, Ellie. I need to have fun, I need to feel alive. Eric and Geoff—”

“But you don't even know them!” I protested.

“How well do we know anyone really, Ellie? I know their type—they have money, and they are generous with it and just want to enjoy themselves. I'm pretty sure they're harmless, and anyway, Ellie, I can handle myself well enough. Really, you are such a square. I am going back in.”

She turned on her heels and left me there. I felt as if I had been slapped in the face. Despite that, part of me still wanted to follow her and warn her about Geoff's behavior toward me, but even as I thought it, I realized how prim it would sound.
“He put his hand on my leg.”

“You are such a square, Ellie!”

Sheila could look after herself, and although I had hoped she would look after me too, it seemed I had been wrong.

A crowd had gathered around me at the edge of the awning in their shimmering evening coats and tuxedos, waiting to go in. I stood to one side to let them pass, alone, shaken, prim and shockingly sober. For a moment I envied Sheila's willful abandon, but I had no desire to go back in and join her.

C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN

There were taxis pulling up along the curb, but I needed to clear my head, so I decided to walk back to the hotel. The night air was fresh and the streets were well lit, so I started up East 54th Street toward the park.

I was wide awake with anger and confusion. I didn't know when Sheila would come back to the hotel, and had made no arrangements about keys. Or if, indeed, she would come back at all. I had come looking to her for comfort, and she had betrayed me in her selfish, self-centered way. But then, I knew what Sheila was like, so why had I traveled all the way across the world to follow a stupid dream?

More annoying was the fact that I was still worried about her and what fate might befall her at the hands of those two men. Then I remembered having been in a constant state of fear for her propriety when we were younger, and what a pointless, thankless exercise that had turned out to be!

Sheila would be fine. I, on the other hand, was a widow, wandering alone around the streets of New York City in the middle of the night. It was Sheila who had abandoned me, and not the other way around.

Anger quickened my pace.

I had no idea what time it was. The sky was blue-gray, with pencils of peach light framing the tall buildings. I thought perhaps it was nearly dawn. The shops were closed, but street sellers were already wheeling their carts. In Dublin the women in the city center sold fruit out of children's baby carriages, but it was the first time I had seen it here. On every street corner there were men selling apples and oranges, out of bags set on makeshift stalls of cardboard boxes, baby carriages and wheelbarrows. Many of them seemed to be burly Irish men, the size of day laborers, their faces broken with the shame of selling oranges at a dime a time to pitying passersby—one step away from begging.

As I passed one such stall, the tang of the fresh fruit tempted me to stop. I rummaged in my bag for change, while the man minding the stall looked away, tapping his feet nervously. I assumed he was embarrassed at my making him wait for his money and cursed myself for not having the change in my pocket. I would buy two, three oranges—but as I was handing my change over, a well-dressed man stopped and, leaning across me, took an orange off the stand and walked off without paying, as easily as if he were taking food from his own larder.

“Sir? You forgot to pay . . .” I called after him.

He turned to me, laughing, and waved the orange at me. He had stolen it! From a poor man, trying to make ends meet! It was an outrageous act of ignorance and cruelty—from a well-to-do! I opened my mouth to call out again and shame him, but the orange seller put his hand on my arm to stop me.

“Leave him, lady,” he said. “We all have to pay protection in this town, one way or another.”

Protection? I knew about the gangsters operating in this city—they had run booze through this place like water during the days of Prohibition. They came from all places, they were Irish, Italian, Polish, and I had drunk and danced with them in the speakeasies—and had known they were running on the wrong side of the law. Protection was the money they took from the bar owners to keep the police at bay. It was part of doing business in those days. Everyone drank, so everyone broke the law during Prohibition, even—especially—the police. So many of them were Irish, and who could expect an Irishman not to drink! There had always been the nasty side of crime, of course, but the gangsters were the top end of it and generally kept themselves to themselves. They made their money bootlegging and running nightclubs; they had their battles—I read about brutal shootings—but generally it was with rival gangs. You minded your business, and they minded theirs.

With Prohibition gone, clearly things had changed and they were resorting to stealing oranges from poor men.

The seller took my money and I thought about asking him where he was from and passing the time of day, but he handed me an orange and continued loading his stall. He didn't want to talk. He was just surviving—so I moved along.

The streets were not as bustling as they were during the day and for the first time I noticed that many of the shop fronts were boarded up. Outside one of them I passed a small mountain of blankets and boxes and stopped, briefly, to investigate. As I looked down, an infant blinked up at me from among the woolen debris, its tiny face peering out from the cloister of its mother's bed. I got such a shock that I kept walking and, with each step I took, had the guilty feeling that perhaps I should go back. But to do what, exactly? Wake the woman up? Give her money? Take the child? Such a gesture seemed so vast and yet so pointless. There were clearly thousands of such unfortunates all over New York City. It wasn't my place to interfere. I had enough troubles myself, but the incident jolted me out of my anger toward Sheila and the pity I was starting to feel for myself.

We were poor in Ireland, but I had never seen a woman and child sleeping on the streets. In Dublin perhaps, but certainly never in Kilmoy; the vagrant tramps who walked the land were accommodated in family homes when the winter came. Even those in the filthiest condition were found a bed, or a barn to sleep in, once they knew what doors to knock on. I had come to New York to escape my own problems and I had not been expecting to be confronted with the problems of others. First, the terrible outcome for my old matron, Bridie, and now this human suffering—people living in shacks on the edge of the park, families sleeping in doorways; while I could not, nor did I want to, blinker myself like Sheila, I was nonetheless disappointed that the vibrant city where I had come to live as a young woman now held the same dull ache of depression and desperation that I had come to escape—then and now.

In a moment of clarity I realized that I wanted to go home.

I would return to The Plaza and ask the concierge to book me on the next passage back to Ireland. I would put this trip down to a moment of madness, a mistake. I chose not to remember what had compelled me to leave in the first place.

Lost in my thoughts, the practical details, the certainty of my decision, I did not notice that I was heading up the side of the park and onto Fifth Avenue, automatically taking the familiar route back to the place where I used to work.

I was stopped in my tracks as a small man stepped out from the railings of Central Park right in front of me. I almost jumped out of my skin. Instinctively I pulled my purse to my chest. What had I been thinking, walking along the side of the park at this time of night, when New York was surely rife with vagrant criminals, just as the taxi driver had said.

“Got a cigarette?”

It wasn't a man after all, only a young boy. I recognized him as the same one who had stood in my path the week beforehand. He was alone, and without the cheeky bravado of his gang.

“Sorry if I frightened you, lady. It's not for me—it's for my mom.”

Under the burn of the street lamp I could see he was no more than fourteen or fifteen. His face was brown with sun and dirt and his hands hung limply by his side, his shoulders slumped in the expectation of rejection. I felt suddenly furious, although I wasn't sure why. Perhaps it was the glow of expensive champagne still fizzing inside me; or my rage at Sheila for her wretched, covetous adventures; or rage at myself for following her.

“Where is your mammy?” I asked.

He turned to walk away, but I couldn't let him pass.

“Take me to your mam,” I said, grabbing his arm.

“I don't want no trouble, lady, I just want to get Mom a smoke to calm her nerves. We've had a bad day.”

“I want to help,” I said. “Take me to your mother.”

He looked me in the eye with suspicion and his face turned cold with defensiveness.

“She don't want no one to see her down-at-heel. She's a lady—good as you!”